Violent Faculties (2024)
Premise: What we’re reading is the last paper by a doctor in philosophy that decides to run some experiments about what it means to be human, what is the human soul, when does a human stop being one and all directly from her very own home since they (for some reason) cut her budget and department completely.
Under 90 minutes? I mean it’s a very short read but not that short. You can read it in a sitting though, it’s about 160 pages long.
Do they say the title? Nope.
First thing I thought of:
Okay, more: Okay so this was really good, and I think it hits twice harder (both in the “ew” and “haha, you” departments) if you’ve ever had to read some papers with citations and so on. Specially at first, the book actually does read like a paper, with the detatchment you’d expect from someone explaining their experiment, the conditions and expected results and of course what happens during the course of that. But, haha, of course we’re dealing with actual human beings and the point of view of our narrator is basically “so, why should we care so much about them, all things considered?”. So this is a deep dive inside the mind of somoene who’s been slighted very heavily, mistreated and took for granted. And it’s also a novel where you get a very scientific, cold description of some horrible acts. Where some books or movies would go for the openly grotesque, here you are just given the facts and it is your silly little brain that does the work for you. Deeply unsettling at times, very cool read, if anything my only complaint is that the first couple of ‘experiments’ are way, way more unsettling than anything after that. Or maybe I was becoming numb to it? All in all, a great book and I’m going to make a point of reading more things by Charlene Elsby.
A simple way to improve it: I found it really funny that as the book goes by the detached narrator starts to get a bit more personal, the remarks and footnotes more pointed and honestly, I think she should have been even more catty about it sometimes.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia Goodreads reviews:
⭐⚪⚪⚪⚪
I would have defunded ur department too weirdo
Oh, come on. She really didn’t deserve it!
